Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Busted for Jaywalking!

Introduction

During a recent business trip to Irvine, in southern
California (motto: “The other, lesser California”), I was pulled over by a
motorcycle cop—while walking. He gave me a long, brain-freezing lecture and a
ticket for jaywalking. The fine is close to $200. I’m going to fight it via a
written testimonial. This is my rough draft. Very rough.

Appeal to Citation #[———],
Superior Court of California, County of Orange

I humbly request that my citation for Section Statute 21955
VC (Jaywalking) be dismissed, on the grounds that it’s complete nonsense.

First of all, $200 is really steep for a victimless crime.
If I’m driving a car in an unsafe manner, I’m endangering others—I get that. I
understand that driving a car is a privilege, and that by obtaining my Driver
License I am agreeing in advance to follow the vehicle code. Walking, however,
is not a privilege. It is a God-given right, pre-dating all laws and societies,
and I never agreed to anything when I first put one foot in front of the other
at age two. What right do you have to fine people for not walking how you’d
like them to? When’s the last time a pedestrian hurt anybody?

Moreover, holding my Driver License or Vehicle Registration
hostage if I skip out on this fine is totally baseless. How can you restrict my
driving privilege on the grounds of any misbehavior I committed when not driving a motor vehicle? What’s
next, suspending my license due to moral or intellectual turpitude? And if you
actually make it impossible to register my car, which my wife shares, you are
punishing her as well, along with our two kids. Why stop there? Why not go
after my brothers, my cousins, nieces, nephews, and our parents? It’s insupportable
and absurd.

The motorcycle cop who came after me—long after I committed my
misdeed, which suggests you’re using video cameras to crack down on errant
pedestrians, which is bizarrely inappropriate—has already subjected me to a
long safety lecture which was, I feel it safe to say, humiliating to the cop
and me both. So haven’t I suffered enough? The lecture insulted my intelligence
because the cop said, “Safety is a two-way street. I can’t protect you if you
don’t obey the law.” Protect me?
When’s the last time a cop protected
a pedestrian? There is nothing a cop can
do to protect a pedestrian except perhaps block an intersection, which he
would never do. Pedestrians are utterly defenseless in an era of increasingly
distracted drivers.

Since when do cops protect anybody, for that matter? They only show up after an accident and occasionally
assign penalties, and maybe call in the actual paramedics who try to mitigate
the bodily damage. When’s the last time you saw a cop and thought, “Oh, thank
goodness”? The vast majority of the time, seeing a cop approach you is a basic
“Oh, shit!” moment. But this was not always the case. Cops used to be respected
members of the community. They walked their beats, got to know the citizens,
and built up some rapport and trust. That all changed when they started driving
cars. Now they are just faceless badges, ensconced in vehicles, that go around
busting people. (This is not just my own supposition. A college history course
I took devoted a couple of weeks to the subject of law enforcement, and presented
this as a widely accepted assessment.)

The other totally absurd thing about the cop’s safety
lecture is that he delivered it while stopped on a six-lane thoroughfare that
had no shoulder. I was up on the sidewalk at least, but he was right out there
in the road, absolutely at the mercy of the cars whizzing by. Anybody drunk, texting,
or otherwise distracted could have just wiped this guy out. As annoying as the
cop was, I did not want to see him get run over, so I was cringing the whole
time. And you wanna talk about reckless? This guy is riding around this
congested megalopolis on a motorcycle
forty hours a week! What, is he fricking crazy?!
Who is he to lecture me about
safety? I was tempted to ask him, “Does your mother know what you do for a
living?” But of course I couldn’t, because you just can’t mouth off to cops.

And that’s the most degrading part of all. I had to try to
be all contrite and docile, in the vain hope that he’d let me off the hook. I
tried my best, but I’m sure he caught a whiff of contempt—even if he didn’t
catch mine. I’m sure he didn’t feel this was his finest moment, pontificating
to this hapless pedestrian, sensing the passing cars snickering at both of us.
I’m sure when he dreamed of being a motorcycle cop—a dream based on watching CHiPs, needless to say—he was thinking he’d be catching bad guys, solving actual
crimes, and being a hero. He’d watched Erik Estrada in that one CHiPs episode dancing onstage to “Celebration” and thought maybe he himself also had what it takes. I doubt he figured he’d
one day find himself taking his life in his hands merely to slap the wrist of
the only person stupid enough to try to walk somewhere in southern California.

By the way, the cop was apparently unaware of how egregious
your fines are. I asked for an estimate and he said, “Well, the ticket itself
is only like $20, but then you get all the local and state governments piling
on, with all these extra fees, so it ends up being like $85.” He acted like
this was a real shame, the result of a bloated government apparatus that was a
hindrance to us both, when of course he had the option to let me go with just a
warning. Maybe if he’d known it was $200 he’d have spared me the ticket, or at
least the lecture.

Now, let’s get back to this safety-as-a-two-way street
business. You, the so-called Superior Court, see fit to fine me for behavior
that put my own safety at risk, but actually, you are going after the wrong party. If you really want justice, challenge a road and sidewalk layout that discourages walking, and seek out the city planners that make walking legally in your county a unreasonably inconvenient thing to do. The setup of your roads and sidewalks is actually putting pedestrians like me in far greater danger than we ourselves ever could.

Yes, I crossed a street in the middle, rather than at an
intersection—I admit it. You know why I did it? Well, I was walking along the
sidewalk, which was unpleasant enough because all your streets are like
highways—nothing even slightly resembling a residential street seems to exist
in Irvine—and suddenly the sidewalk just ended. I found myself walking along in
the plants growing alongside the road, literally off in the weeds, with nothing
between me and the cars. This is not only unpleasant, but unsafe. Why provide a
sidewalk for like half of a long stretch of roadwayand then suddenly end it? What city engineer masterminded that design? Or did the city or county just run over budget with the sidewalk half built? Or maybe the construction guys got sick of
building it?

(Here is a photo of what I’m talking about. No, it’s not the
scene of the crime, which location I’m not sure of because your cop pulled me
over far away from where I committed my transgression. Meanwhile, I didn’t know
I’d be ensnared in your legal imbroglio at the time so I didn’t photograph the
civic inadequacy. I snapped the below photo later, in another location which
was equally representative of what I’m talking about. One more thing: I jaywalked in broad daylight, not at night.)

So yeah, I could have turned around and walked a quarter
mile back to the previous intersection, but to be honest, I just didn’t feel
like it. I was not enjoying my walk whatsoever and just wanted to get it over
with. I was like, “Okay, Irvine, you win! I won’t walk anymore! I didn’t
understand before! I get that you hate pedestrians!” I had come to understand
why I was almost the only pedestrian in the entire city, unless you count the
quasi-homeless-looking woman I saw herding her small child the day before. But as
it happened, an instance of amazing fortuity presented itself: in both
directions, all the traffic was stuck behind red lights off in the distance,
giving me ample time to cross the road to the other side where there was a
sidewalk. I calculated that no believable rate of acceleration could bring
either wall of cars in range of hitting me. I was in a position to manage my
risk very effectively.

Crossing a road in this situation, I believed in the moment
and continue to believe, is a safer scenario than crossing at an intersection,
where motorists are allowed to turn right whenever they deem it safe. It’s up
to them to look for pedestrians in the intersection, and in SoCal the motorists
do a very poor job of this. Why? Because there are hardly ever pedestrians in
your sprawling, poorly planned so-called community! We’re about as common as
space aliens! In pretty much any intersection in your wretched county, I am
putting myself at the mercy of people who have all but forgotten pedestrians
exist. Your jaywalking law essentially mandates that I outsource my safety to
complete strangers who routinely neglect to use their turn signals, fail to pay
attention, and have been taught to believe cars are “the heartbeat of America”
and that driving is some kind of game.

When I ponder the fact that you’re slapping me down for my measly infraction, in support of a civic engineering apparatus that demonstrates not just incompetence but practical contempt for safety, I almost throw up
in my mouth. You know what’s dangerous? These labyrinths of asphalt, more than
driveways but not quite roads, that connect the giant boulevards to the scattered buildings within the bloated office parks dotting your sprawling landscape. Even Google Maps can’t
really make sense of these little connectors. Once you’ve parked your car, you have to cross first the giant parking lot, then these twisty quasi-roads, and this is far, far more
dangerous than what I did, which was merely crossing a straight road at a
perpendicular.When drivers try to
navigate these rats’ nests of tarmac, they get very confused, and end up paying
more attention to their GPS screens than to what’s in front of their cars.

You want proof? I took three Ubers during my brief visit to Irvine. The
first Uber driver had to crane her neck quite a bit, and stopped dead in the
roadway at various intervals, but nonetheless managed to find her way around.
But the next two Uber drivers, despite their navigation systems, managed to get
very lost indeed. I submit to you Exhibits A and B.

In both cases I watched their groping progress on my phone.
That first guy found himself navigating a loop to nowhere. The second guy
missed a turn and ended up driving a long way in one direction, making a
90-degree left, driving another long distance—trapped by a little road to
nowhere and having to make a U-turn at the end and backtrack both long
stretches before getting back on track. Now consider that all these little
roads are eclipsed by parked cars, and that you’ve got people walking
diagonally across these vague unmarked spaces, without a sidewalk to be seen
anywhere. It’s like Frogger on LSD! For you to pretend that you’ve figured out
not just a safe way, but the safe way
for a person on foot to navigate this automotive nightmare, and that anybody
who strays from this safe scheme deserves to be heavily fined—well, it’s like
something out of a darkly satirical work of dystopian fiction.

If real justice were to be served, it would involve
evacuating your irreparably screwed up county, bulldozing everything in it, and
then bringing in intelligent, learned city planners from a properly functioning
city—I’m thinking perhaps San Francisco or Amsterdam—and just starting over.
Then you could have a place where people aren’t driving fifteen minutes or more
to every destination, putting up with constantly bad traffic, and voicelessly
accepting an asphalt tyranny that leaves no room for responsible transit like
walking and bicycling. By starting over from scratch, you might actually develop
a community where people can enjoy
getting around. But instead, what do you do? You put in surveillance cameras so
you can punish pedestrians for not complying with your absurdist, half-baked,
ultimately utterly benighted “safety” principles! You should be ashamed of
yourselves.

Obviously there’s
nothing practical for the Superior Court of California, County of Orange, to do
about a massive civic problem that has been steadily building for decades. You
could, however, admit the farcical error inherent in punishing me for your community’s sins, by
dismissing my case and striking it from the record. Thank you for your
consideration.